Report on the 4th Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: People, Information and Technology: The Social Analysis of Computing

Kalpana Shankar is assistant professor in the School of Informatics at Indiana University, 901 E. 10th Street, Rm. 303, Bloomington, IN 47408; shankarkindiana.edu Howard Rosenbaum is associate dean and associate professor of information science in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, 1320 East 10th Street, LI 011; Bloomington, IN 47405-3907; hrosenbaindiana.edu S ocial informatics (SI) researchers are interested and engaged in work that assumes a critical stance towards the notion of mutual shaping – or, as the 2008 ASIS&TAnnual Meeting theme might have asked: What is involved in people transforming information and information transforming people? A critical analysis is useful to “bring into question established social assumptions and values regarding information and communication technologies (ICTs) and established understandings of information, particularly as they play themselves out and are institutionalized in social and professional discourses and professional training” [1]. That said, it is inaccurate to suggest that social informatics is unified in content area, analytical framework or methodological approach. Indeed, the variety of research in social informatics reflects the pervasiveness of computing and information in individual, organizational and sociocultural contexts. The panoply of approaches and subjects of interest was illustrated in the half-day Social Informatics Research Symposium, sponsored by SIG/SI and co-sponsored by SIG/USE, at the Annual Meeting. This event followed up on the extremely successful symposia held prior to the Annual Meetings in 2004, 2006 and 2007. The symposium was well suited to the ASIS&T 2008 Annual Meeting theme because it showcased research on the mutual shaping that occurs between people and information, mediated by technology, that has long been a fundamental assumption of social informatics [2]. For the first time, the symposium was co-sponsored by SIG/USE, with a networking lunch in the middle of the day before the SIG/USE Symposium. Co-sponsorship with the SIG/USE symposium afforded participants a full day of exploration of the transformative relationship between people and information from different but clearly related perspectives. The variety of papers (10 in total and two posters) in the SI symposium exemplified the importance of social informatics research in opening the “black box” of computing to reveal and critique interactions of power, mediation and sociality with information in use. Although the papers were not reviewed and selected for any harmony of theme or approach, a number of underlying problems and questions did emerge, which we explore in the rest of this article. The role of information in the workplace has always been an important focus of information behavior research and social informatics; indeed, social informatics began as a set of lenses with which to understand how computerization has shaped and been shaped by work and the workplace [3]. Social informatics research has suggested that the very nature of work (and what counts as work and workers) has been reconfigured by the introduction of ICTs. Thus, while ICTs have automated numerous repetitive tasks and enabled asynchronous and geographically dispersed teams to work together, their design and subsequent uses continue to have numerous unintended consequences. These consequences in the workplace can be marked at multiple levels